A Conversation with Martin Heidegger
11
The names my tongue can't say aren't those who,
in your way, still chart our universities false.
I want to know what warps we tunnel through,
from knowing these unnameables, to pursue our
daily pretensions, our standards for living?
Martin, we endow ironed white shirts still;
decade on decade: wherever peace bonds kill
today. Feds harassing journalists and scholars
for trying to sing with the authors of liberty
the only thing that can save us or others,
here, in Managua, Soweto, or Port-au-Prince,
where bodies strangely grow from dirt or asphalt,
our fingerprints in the lead roots of red flowers.
Protesting students threatened in quiet nights
deans and their tails wag out deja vu Edgar's
boys called integrationists Red in the fifties)--
we too make non-persons of those who protest--
as our president, all-cap smile and tinted hair,
shrugs and talks of freedom, our own barmy
Wagnerian stagehand--where the Emancipator sat--
killing another's revolution, as Chrysler remodels
Liberty by The Book of 0, making her a fancy lady
for United Fruit, cavities stretched
until tanks drive through: the foreplay of war.
The President of the Screen Actors, playing SS
for the Bureau, prescribed capsules to metabolize
terror in our bloodstream, where his U-boat rises,
sliding up the Potomac toward the lake of ice
at the core, his leading lady gliding at his side,
nothing real but costumes, roles, of make-out,
made-up evangelists who give directions while
writing a mad play where the electors are extras
Van K. Brock
A Conversation 12 | Ein Gespräch 11
Contents | Mudlark No. 4